"'You’re an artist when you say you are,' Amanda Palmer offered in her emboldening reflection on the creative life. 'And you’re a good artist when you make somebody else experience or feel something deep or unexpected.' Nearly a century earlier, Sherwood Anderson advised his spiring-artist son: 'The object of art is not to make salable pictures. It is to save yourself.' But one of the greatest meditations on what art is and isn’t, on the pleasures and perils of the creative life, comes from E.E. Cummings, whose lesser-known prose enchants very differently and yet by the same mechanism that his celebrated poetry does — by inviting the reader to 'pick his way toward comprehension, which comes, when it does, in a burst of delight and recognition.'"